


The Good Spirit of the Forest

by Amand_r



Category: Torchwood
Genre: F/F, post-coe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-02
Updated: 2011-04-02
Packaged: 2017-10-17 11:39:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/176478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It probably started before she noticed it.  Granted, for the past few years she'd been busy—best to keep oneself busy, she always told Dee—but by the time she did notice it, it had probably only been going on for a few months.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Good Spirit of the Forest

_'I formed in my imagination a thousand pictures of presenting myself to them, and their reception of me. I imagined that they would be disgusted, until, by my gentle demeanour and conciliating words, I should first win their favour and afterwards their love.'_  
\--Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

 **MARCH:**

It probably started before she noticed it. Granted, for the past few years she'd been busy—best to keep oneself busy, she always told Dee—but by the time she did notice it, it had probably only been going on for a few months. But there it was, suddenly, a little surprise in the form of her laundry, taken from the line out back in the garden, painstakingly folded and stacked in her basket, set on the back stair right by the door.

Alice tilted her head, looked about, but there was nothing amiss- the laundry tree was folded back into place, the clothespins in the hanging bag her mother had made her when she'd gone off to uni.

She picked up the basket, hefted it, is if its weight could tell her something, then went inside to set the basket on the counter and kiss Dee's cheek.

"Thank you, but what's that for?" Dee asked while oiling the slide of the gun she'd dismantled and cleaned on the kitchen counter.

Alice started the kettle. "For folding the laundry. All those military corners." She winked. "Good for more than ironing and making the bed."

Dee glanced at the basket. "I'd love to take credit, but that wasn't me."

Alice pulled two mugs from the tree (she avoided the dusty bright one painted by a child's hand) and set them down before putting her hands on her hips and assuming her 'thinking' pose. Hrm. Well then.

"It was probably Mrs. MacCready," she said slowly, brain whirring. "She always complains that we have too many wrinkles."

Dee didn't look up. "She has too many wrinkles on her face."

"She's eighty-three."

Dee reassembled the slide onto the rails and snapped the Glock back into place. "Well, we'd best not complain. Folding our laundry is a lot better than those digestives she makes us out of bulgar wheat."

Alice glanced out the window at Mrs. MacCready's back garden door. "Right."

 

 **MAY:**

The front garden to the house was small, but there was a flowerbed in front of the veranda, and for the past five years it had been bare, one of those things she always meant to get around to, but just never did, and couldn't bring herself to pay someone else to do because she could do it herself. Thus, years of dry dirt that probably made her neighbours cringe at poor property values.

So when the house next door went up for sale, coming home to a fully-planted attractive flowerbed hadn't been completely confusing, only mildly.

The small bed had been turned by an inexpert hand, sure, and the dirt was disturbed in that way so clumps of it spilled into the edge of the green grass. But it was fresh and dark; it had been carted in special.

The flowers themselves were transplants, carefully lifted from flats of tiny plastic containers and arranged in a shape actually, so that they formed a giant filled in red oval. Even more strange and slightly creepy was the fact that in the midst of all those red flowers, meticulously placed ones dotted through so that in a pointillist manner they spelled out "A" and "D".

"Well that's pleasant," Dee said, sorting through the post and glancing at the flowerbed. "Is this what you did this afternoon? I thought you were working."

"I _was_ working," Alice replied, toeing the short flower stems with one foot. They were real, and they were planted. "I thought you did this." If she slid her shoe off and dug it into the dirt of the bed, she was sure that the loam would be wet. Whoever did this had understood what they were doing. Read instructions for planting flowers online, do doubt.

Dee snorted. "Not bloody likely. You have a card." He handed Alice the envelope and shuffled the rest of the post, staring down at the flowers. "They are lovely, then." Her eyes cut to Alice and they both shrugged. "Do you want me to dig them up?"

Alice considered it for a second, but that was childish and troublesome. They weren't poisonous after all, just a bed of flowers, albeit not tall ones. Lower to the ground, even. "No," she said slowly.

"Poppies," Dee said as she climbed the steps to the front door. "I've seen enough of those in my day."

Alice thought about it as she ripped the envelope open without thinking. The card was simple, one of those things you pick up in the drugstore from the 80p bin, but the picture matched the red and yellow poppies in front of her, set in the flowerbed like icing on a fairy cake.

 _Tanti auguri_

Huh. It wasn't possible.

 

 **AUGUST:**

"So I told him that if he wanted to fire me then he could go ahead and do it," she said, leaning against the tyre. Her beer sloshed in her bottle. "But that I would sue the trousers off him."

"Good call," Dee said from under the car. There was a clanking and a wrench skittered out from where she was working. "It's not like you haven't had to put up with world class bullshite since you started there. Hand me that thing, the thing…." One hand snaked out from under the car and felt on the ground.

Alice picked up the wrench and put it into Dee's hand. "Yes, well, he's an immature arse." She took a swallow of beer, finished the bottle. "I know how to deal with little boys masquerading as men."

Dee slid out from under the car and sat up, brushing her hands on her jumpsuit. One of her cheeks was painted with a smear of grease that made her look more martial than normal. Alice resisted the urge to wipe at it with her fingers. "I don't get it Al, you said you hadn't changed the oil in months."

Alice rolled her eyes. "More like six months. I forget. When was the last time you were on deployment?"

Dee narrowed her eyes. "Last February. You haven't changed your oil since Last February?"

Alice looked out over the garden and sighed. "Yeah, I think. I don't drive the car very often, so I figured I'd go by mileage instead of…what?"

Dee pulled the pan from under the car and showed her the clear, tan liquid. "This oil is almost virgin," she said. "Even if you didn't drive the car very often, you'd still have to change it, by the way. But this, this is brand new."

Alice glanced about, as if she'd see him somewhere, but the street was empty, just like it should have been.

 

 **OCTOBER:**

The box sat on the step next to the monster pile of raked leaves. She almost hadn't seen it. She _would_ have missed it if the leaves hadn't been raked, their neat and tidy appearance so startling that she'd paused. She kicked at one, as if she suspected that there was a body underneath, but the dried leaves just gusted and drifted with her swat at them, skittering down the pavement.

The box was simple cardboard with a lid, the kind any high-end store might provide, and she set it on her lap as she sat on the steps and lifted the lid digging through the tissue paper on top to pull out the music box inside. It wasn't very large, but the ceramic diorama on top of it depicted a cheery yellow sun with large edges of orange rays, the paint glossy and bright, the puffy clouds below it white and gray, heavy with impending rain.

The key was planted in the bottom of it, nestled in between the stubby legs that would hold it up if she chose to set it down on the step. She worked the key until it became unturnable, then flipped the release at the bottom, looking about, because she couldn't have imagined that he wouldn't have wanted to see this.

The tune started to play, and she knew all the words, could sing along to the metallic plinking of the spool inside:

 _You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,  
You make me happy, when skies are gray,  
You'll never know dear, how much I love you,  
Please don't take my sunshine away._

She beat the music box off the side of the concrete steps until the spool wound down and the ceramic sun was jagged with broken bits, and then she loaded the pieces back into the packaging box and closed the lid.

The drive to the Plass was fairly quiet. It was two in the morning, and she pulled into the circle at James Street and put on her blinkers—she wasn't going to be there long anyway. The night was cool and she could see her breath a little—it occurred to her that it was going to be a cold winter. Barely anyone was about, actually, which had been her goal, and she didn't fancy being stopped by some well-meaning bobby who would think what she was doing was the act of a madwoman.

The rebuilt Plass was pretty much like the old Plass, as if they had decided to make it just like it was out of deference to tradition. She figured they were just to cheap to pay for new plans, and the Senned had just dug the old ones out of storage and unrolled them like unpacking an old wedding dress.

Trying to find a good spot to set the box took a minute, but she settled on one of the beaten paving stones in front of the water tower fountain, the one right in the middle. Someone would probably think that there was a bomb inside, but she didn't quite care. She set the box down and backed up, looking for the first camera she could find. It was there, attached to one of the pillars of the Plass, set up to record the actions below it, probably never monitored, really, unless there was reason.

Well. She waved her hands in the general direction of the CCTV camera, knowing that she must look like a nutter. Then she gestured to the box, ominous and innocent on the paving stone. "I DON'T WANT IT," she mouthed at the camera as steadily as she could.

She didn't bother staying. She didn't care if he even got it back. He'd see everything eventually. He always did.

 

 **JANUARY:**

The noise stirred her in the middle of the night. For a while she'd incorporated the steady nature of it into her dream, and then something must have jolted her awake--a break in the rhythm, the coldness of Dee's foot on her leg under the covers, perhaps just the lucid awareness that the noise wasn't created inside her mind, but from an outside influence.

 _Shrrrrrrrip. whump. Shirrrrrrrrrrrip…whump_

Dee rolled over and threw an arm over her face. "Who the hell is doing that at this hour? What time is it?"

Alice checked the clock. "Half-past three." Her eyes drifted to the window, with the streetlights softly illuminating the lazy drift of fat snowflakes through the air. "It's still snowing."

 _Shrrrrrrrip. whump. Shirrrrrrrrrrrip…whump_

"That's insane."

Alice threw back the covers. "Yeah," she mumbled. Dee said something incomprehensible and then settled under the duvet, burrowing her face into the down covers. Alice pulled a robe over her nightshirt and padded barefoot down the stairs, peeking through the curtains at the dark form working in their front garden and walkway.

 _Shrrrrrrrip. whump. Clang clang clang. Shriiiiip._

She left it be, walking into the kitchen and putting in the kettle, finding a dusty mug painted by a child's hand, and another more familiar, friendly one for herself. Trusty box of PG Tips. She drummed her fingers on the counter edge, staring at a faded card decorated with poppies, still pinned to the fridge with a magnet, half-buried under a collage of take-away menus. Her eyes unfocused, she was staring so hard, and when the kettle whistled, she almost missed it for a full minute. It was far away, something she might incorporate into a dream, actually.

Another two minutes of waiting for the tea to somewhat brew, and then let the teabags settle on the bottom of the cups like unpleasant surprises before she carried them both to the front door, juggling them by the handles to flip the deadbolt and negotiate the latch.

He was surprised to see her, she could tell by the way he turned and then had to recover his face. He had never been good at hiding his face from her, not the things that he didn't want her to see, and maybe that was genetics.

 _I know the trick of you._

She walked to the edge of the covered veranda and held out the mug. "Come on then," she said, and he leaned on the handle of the snow shovel, frozen, fallen to the coldness of the world outside and becoming a statue himself. Alice watched his eyes read hers, and maybe he knew the trick of her too, her secret puzzle-box-ness, because he tilted the shovel against the house as he walked up the steps, stopping below her and reaching up with one hand to take Stephen's brightly-coloured mug.

She left him once the transfer was complete, yanking the robe tighter around her and sitting on the bench by the front door, staring out at the six or so inches of snow on the ground. No one was going anywhere tomorrow. The hulking black of the SUV he'd come in was haphazardly parked along the street, as if he hadn't been sure how close he could get to her, or just didn't know where the kerb was in the snow's deceptive depth-perceptive properties.

"I woke you," he said.

She snorted and wondered if it was redundant to blow on tea when it was this cold outside. At this rate her breath might make it warmer. "Yeah."

"That wasn't what I meant—"

"Yeah."

She wasn't ready for this, oh dear god, she didn't ever want this. When others her age were struggling to put their parents into care homes or taking them in to provide close treatment or usher them out of this world loved and aware that they are valuable, appreciated, her parent was shoveling her walk and trying to apologise for--

He sat next to her and blew on his tea before taking a sip. Okay then. His smile was rueful as he looked out at the snow. "I think blowing on it makes it warmer."

She stuck a finger in and was rewarded with a burning scald.

After about three minutes, he lowered the mug and turned just his head to look at her. "I'm sorry," he said, voice no longer soft, but his normal, not genial, but genuine, tone.

She sipped from her tea and stared at the mound of snow burying the flowerbed. "Don't." It felt like a scar that was stretched until it had torn, old tissue and patches rendered inadequate by the movement of the body, of their body of life, until it had to scab over again, create more scar tissue. A rawness made new in a half-hearted attempt to heal it.

What would her mum have said? "Hush up and drink your tea, petal."

He sighed into the tea, ripples on the surface before they were killed by the movement of it to his lips. He'd taken his gloves off, thin leather things good for driving and shooting and the light chill of the Cardiff winters, but not very insulated. She wondered if he felt the cold that way, in his long greatcoat, brass buttons like a soldier, her daddy, a warrior, coming home from battle to shovel her snow-covered walkway.

Because that was what daddies did for their little girls—who taught him that?

Dee would tell her to hit him, but her hands were moulded to the ceramic, and not just because it was cold.

"I lost someone too," he said, hands cupping the mug.

"Was it your only child?" she bit, snapping the whip, picking the scab completely. Blood welled through the torn flesh.

He didn't say the obvious. The thing she'd already thought of. Because estranged wasn't the same as rotting in the ground, and never would be, and lover wasn't the same as child, and never would be.

"Mrn," she said into her cup, then stared out at the falling flakes of snow. "It's not going to stop any time soon, is it?"

He stared at her for a second before blinking out at the trees, boughs heavy with the weight of wet ice and snow, blinked, and stood. "I guess not," he said softly. He drained the mug and set it on the railing, then tugged on his gloves. "I'll do another pass and then I'm out of here," he told her, turning.

"I have—" she stopped, standing and pulling her robe together about her nightshirt. The cold poured up the bottom of it and seeped into her skin anyway. It was worse when she was standing. He looked at her then, eyes skirting along the features of her face in question. She suspected that if she raised her leg, she could boot him right down the stairs and he would let her.

Satisfying thought, that.

"I have an old pair of Joe's gloves here," she said, looking at his sodden hands. "Your hands must be freezing."

He opened his mouth to say something, then snapped it shut. Maybe he was going to tell her some fairy tale about not feeling the cold, about being genetically bred not to feel it, or how the Snorkacks of Gleeb were made of liquid nitrogen and he'd defeated them all with a dryer vent on high.

She opened the door and stepped up into the house. "Come on then."

She didn't stop to see if he followed, but the footfall sounded, familiar, something she remembered from being a child, something deep down she knew she would hear again. Again and for the rest of her life.

END

 _'I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.'_  
\--Mary Shelley, Frankenstein


End file.
